Tangled
by Tiggy Malvern
Summary: Fourth in the nontrilogy, following on from Wires, Strung and Frayed. Heavy on the SandsEl slash angle and bad language. I'm classifying it romance as the nearest thing on the list, though it makes my brain curdle to do it!


_The fourth in the ever-expanding trilogy. Grateful thanks to Nico and Ms Anon for betas. And to Robert Rodriguez for owning and sharing all his amazing ideas and worlds._

In some ways, sex with Sands was little different from sex with anyone else.

El's taste in women had always based itself more in strength of personality and quick-witted intelligence than on any particular physical 'type'. There had been marked variation in those who shared his bed, and while the body flexed beneath him now varied a little more, his erection cared nothing for the distinctions in the source of the slick warmth clenching around him.

The sex had always varied too - what they wanted from him, what he wanted from them, switching with mood and circumstance, between one night's fun or comfort and long term love. He'd covered the range of reasons and emotions, knew that appearance and front had little to do with sexual choices. Knew this drive, the compulsion he felt for this man, this release.

In other ways, sex with Sands, like anything with Sands, was entirely its own thing. Sands didn't compare easily with anyone; he fit only his own scale.

El's previous dealings with men who resembled Sands had been short, and often violent. He'd never had reason to study, to make the effort to understand.

Watching Sands never grew dull or repetitive. With Sands, the fascination lay in the alignment of every fine detail, the precise arrangement of words in a sentence that would have the effect he desired. And so it was in watching him - El knew him now, and the differences were there to see, to reveal; the crooked angle of a smile, the depth of the lines around his mouth and along his forehead, the exact timing of a twitch at his jaw. He knew him in all his tightly leashed anger, in the deep, exaggerated joy of his viciousness, in the so easily triggered twisted amusement and the brief spikes of genuine humour and laughter - and watching could never be boring, the flashes, the transitions, flicker-fast and ever-changing. Sands provoked in El tension and restlessness, anger and flaring desire and frustration, a rare dissolving comfort and pleasure and calm; never boredom, never anything even close.

El knew him too as he was now, head thrown back and throat arching long, his tongue working and swallowing behind parted, panting lips. Saw him when he stopped being Sands, and became for these mayfly moments a man who only wanted and enjoyed.

Sands moved his hand faster over his own cock, stretching then breaking the rhythm shared between them. Curled himself upwards for El, onto him, hooked fingers tighter into his shoulder to haul him down and insist heavy by his ear, "Move, you fucker!"

That was one of those things that was uniquely Sands - none of El's previous partners had cursed at him quite so much in bed. Carolina had saved that specialty of hers for when they fought, not for the making up.

El had no objections to meeting Sands' demand, however he expressed it.

Sands' fingers released him as his body gathered, sliding over his chest to drop away, and El arched himself upright and beyond, weight flexing back past the bend of his knees, his hand dropping to the bed behind, sinking into a mattress that reshaped around his splayed fingers. _Pushed _with his hand and with his hips, his cock sliding deeper, smooth into offered flesh. He held there, stilled, feeling the pull and stretch all through the muscles down his thighs with the angle. "Like that?" he asked.

"Christ, El, and people say I talk too much." Sands was pseudo-muttering for the eye-rolling effect, but it was broken by the rush of air fast through his words, the tension-hitch in his legs hooked over El's thighs.

"That's because you do," El told him, smiling as he dropped his hips to press forward again, because Sands rarely gave a simple answer but his body did, reply in the shiver of skin glowing harsh with shower-damp and faint sweat beneath the fluorescents, in the hardened press of muscle against El as Sands pushed with feet flat to the mattress, lifting to move with him.

And El let go.

No thinking, no analysing, just the sensation and the man spread around him, his fingers moving to close with Sands' over his cock, stroking as they slid together, finding the rhythm they both demanded. His breath hitching now, broken and irregular over Sands', the coiling tension through all his nerves, the seeking, Sands' hand gripping wide just above his knee, till he was driven to the end of it, the shiver-pause and the need and release, clutching hard at the man who brought him to it.

Breaking the pause, keeping the movement, because Sands was still taut beneath him, still open-mouthed and reaching, his fingers dragging El's faster; and El tightened his grip around him, hooked his thumb to brush along the ridge below the head, curled his body down to breathe a path slow and long and heated over Sands' chest until he too shuddered through into the relaxation, his cock pulsing warm within the arc of El's fingers.

El eased his half-softened cock from Sands' body, shifting back along the sheets to free Sands' legs from their position wrapped over his thighs; straightening with one hand settled above Sands' knee, familiar bullet scar raised distinct and rough alongside his own.

Sands pushed his feet out loose, lay with his head back and lips still slightly parted, the flow of his breath catching into smooth equilibrium, slowing.

If Sands spoke now, it would be lightly mocking and irreverent, some casual aside that said nothing about the sex and whether it had been good, nothing about them.

More often with the weeks, he chose instead to simply stretch and sleep.

El lifted his hand from Sands' body, examining the thick drops of liquid clinging there. He didn't like the taste so much, but he'd grown used to it a little, and it seemed... wrong to keep wiping it away in disgust after what Sands did so easily for him.

There was only a small amount over his thumb, his first two knuckles, most of it a glistening line arrowed along Sands' stomach, tangled among the sparse hair, and El raised his hand to his mouth and licked himself quickly clean, before it cooled and tasted worse.

Sands rolled and twisted beneath his other hand, El's fingers slack and light to slide freely over his skin as he reached for the tissues on the table beside the bed.

El had tasted his own once from curiosity, as he assumed every teenage boy had, and he also assumed every teenage boy would choose to use a cloth.

His eyes followed the path of the paper as Sands cleaned his body, quick and efficient, wiping upwards from the lube-glistened shaft of his fading erection, long strokes carried across his skin. Sands dropped the tissue casually off the edge of the bed into the waste paper basket they kept there, low electric light catching in the glow of liquid as he moved, a skewed line suspended on the tips of curling hairs.

"You missed a little."

The wrinkles formed across Sands' nose as he stretched out an arm to pluck another tissue. "Where?" It was a simple question, none of the bristled reaction that would once have followed such a comment.

"It's quicker to do than to tell."

"Personal service - I think I like it." Sands flicked up the tissue to dangle before his nose, and El took it from him, teasing away the last sticky streak, slow, careful not to spread it further. He disposed of the paper as Sands had, still kneeling while Sands arranged himself and the sheet, watching the shivers in the mattress flow down to meet his shins, the vibrations fluttering damped beneath his weight.

He folded his body into the curve of Sands', dipped his head down to his neck, rested a hand low on his ribs.

Sands didn't like more, but he accepted this. And he didn't pull away when he slept.

The offer had been given, and El had taken Sands as a lover, deliberate and aware. He saw little point in any pretence between them that they weren't.

Lover was an odd word for Sands, but El had no other. The 'fuckbuddy' term that Sands occasionally indulged in didn't encompass them either, high, jarring overtones of a temporary situation that could be abandoned at any time for something better. And maybe the sex was still about that, a convenience because there was no one else, maybe they would both still otherwise choose a woman. But El had found with the years that sex was more when it involved someone constant, someone trusted, and he thought now that breasts would be a poor substitute for what he had.

Sands... Sands would never have wanted those things. He would have fucked from passing desire, for convenience, for amusement. Though El thought maybe betrayal and blinding had changed that. Maybe Sands too would now choose the trust.

El wasn't looking for anything better. He didn't believe Sands was either.

The subtleties of language, the definition and the implied nuances of each word, they were created and shaped by the majority, by those whose lives meant work and shopping, family and a home. It was little surprise that words stumbled and failed him when he looked to them to describe himself and Sands.

He closed his eyes against the irrepressible city neon creeping past the window blinds. Listened to the undulating swish of tyres over rain with each slow-passing car, the heavy beat of trucks rising through it; felt the cycle constant in the body alongside him, marking the flow of Sands' breath low and steady, an equilibrium matched with the world outside.

He liked this feeling; the simplicity of it, his body relaxed and his head emptied. Liked knowing it was there when he needed it.

Sands wriggled alongside him, raising a hand lazy to beat at his pillow, shifting his head as he subdued it beneath him. Metallic chink muffled and low, inevitable with the movement, the kiss of the paired guns below it, and Sands' neck curved as he resettled to brush against El's nose.

A strand of hair strayed to spread water-cool over his cheek, and El let it lay.

Sands no longer needed him. To stay with El was a choice, only because he wanted it, and El believed now that he would stay. Would stay as long as El gave him no reason to leave, no pressure, no ultimatum, and El had no need of those.

He wanted to... keep Sands, to protect Sands, yes. But Sands let him have that, deliberate and silent, the same ease with which El gave Sands guard over himself.

When their lives hung between the bullets, Sands accepted his judgement implicitly, moving through some part of the world he barely knew, in sure, unquestioning response to El's voice. To have that, coming from the man it did - Sands gave him more, far more, than he had given to anyone; far more than El had once thought him capable of.

It wasn't that Sands was in any way altered; he was a man who had always been quick to adapt where he found advantage. If Sands had been capable of deeper change, he wouldn't ever have left El, but he had been driven instead to break the world alone, and so keep himself.

Sands could only ever be Sands, and the reminders flickered visible through the days.

_Sands knew the man was there - he'd thumped away from the shop's counter hard enough in his anger that Sands would have felt the vibrations even if he'd been deaf - and he swung his cane ahead of him as he turned, catching the man fast across the knee so that he stumbled and almost tripped._

_"Sorry," he said, his quick-and-gone smile not even attempting to fake the word. "I didn't see you there."_

_El watched, still, careful, as he did each time they met._

_There was one in most neighbourhoods, wherever the city, a big man who considered himself far bigger. He was no form of danger, not to them, but he was of the kind that, to many people, were not entirely harmless either._

_It was irresistible to Sands, that constant air of challenge from someone inferior, thrashing fish signals through the water to the shark. Sands would bait and press, doubling the stakes with each round until the man made his choice, either to back down or to push the conflict. And even backing down may not save him._

_This time, he ignored Sands entirely, turning his attention along the aisle and rigid eyes onto El. "You should keep your blind pet on a leash. He might wander off one day and disappear."_

_"What did you have in mind?" Sands answered instantly. "How about something in black leather, nice and soft, maybe with a few studs for effect?" His smile curled sharp, his voice slowing, dropping, his free hand loose at his side with no hint at the guns. "I'll bet that image really does it for you, doesn't it? I know you're standing there right now, getting hard, pressing into your jeans thinking about two guys and all the things they could do with some good ties and chains."_

_"You shut the fuck up, you pathetic little deviant!" The man's fist flashed back and raised, and El rocked and tightened with the **surge** of it, heavy and driving, and Sands leaned in towards the threat, resting his hands and a little of his weight on the cane._

_"You wouldn't hit a blind man, would you?"_

_The man's eyes swung back to El, beyond to the shop's owner, the two watching customers, and he lowered his arm. Stepped forward, closer, almost alongside Sands and speaking past his ear. "You shouldn't rely on that too much," he said, quiet, and something else so low and fast that El didn't hear, but nothing in his tones or posture suggesting apology._

_Sands' eyebrows lifted high over the dark, reflecting curve of the lenses. "Oh, I kind of doubt that," he said distinctly, and the man walked on past, far too close, one arm brushing and tugging at Sands' jacket, and El saw the stiffness flash into his fingers over the head of the cane._

_Sands' head turned slow to follow him as he left, lips curling at the edges through the set of his jaw, and he took a step forward._

_El was alive and moving close, Sands light all alongside him as he touched a hand to his back. People would see nothing in it, only a concerned man guiding his blind friend._

_He turned his head, lips inches from Sands' ear. "Don't." He kept his voice low, so others wouldn't overhear, but the word was soft beyond that, nothing like command._

_Sands whipped around towards him, single jump of muscle in his cheek, heated breath over El's lips. "Why not?" Calm and slow in drawled disinterest, and nothing like the truth._

_He could have told Sands that they didn't need the complications, the police searching, that they might have to leave. But Sands knew that, and didn't care. "I don't want you to," he said, simple, only a statement._

_Sands turned back away, unerringly picking up and tracking the departing man, head angled and face immobile._

_It would have looked less like concerned friendship minutes later when El led Sands into a deep-shadowed alleyway and kissed him. Nothing too long, too dramatic, enough to be meaningful with Sands' tongue twined around his own. Enough to feel the shiver and the change through Sands' body._

_Enough to feel it through his own._

_It worked the same way in both of them. Different when they were alone, easier with just the two of them, the fast-spreading illusion of safety. It was a lie, because in the end everything was, but there was enough inside both of them that wanted to believe it, the loss of tension an immediate, automatic response._

_El broke the kiss after only seconds, because there were still people nearby who might pass, might see. "Thank you," he said, and he meant it._

_Sands' nose twitched and wrinkled beneath the sunglasses. "Screw that, he's barely worth a bullet, and he definitely isn't worth the hassle." He lifted a hand to the frame behind one lens as he stepped away, the habitual gesture, checking, straightening. "When I get bored of living here, I might just have to let him know."  
_

El liked living here too.

He lay, the brush of air from the fan waxing and waning in cycles across his eyelids; he knew the river-eddied course beyond them, the flow and tributaries of the faint cracks through the plaster that meandered along the wall before curving up to the ceiling. His guitar rested against the wall beneath, a new companion unwounded by travel, unbattered by ill treatment, exposure and neglect; cedar and rosewood with tones mellow and layered to fit his moods, a darker reflection to edge the brightness at his fingertips.

The rooms pinged soft behind him, familiar beat of the pipes cooling after his shower, the rhythm fading slow, prolonged with the passing minutes.

It was good to have a place. They only leased by the month, and it was too big, and empty, because they had nothing to keep here and two men didn't rent an apartment with only one bedroom in Paraguay; not when they had money for more. But it was a base, and it felt secure, and oddly normal, and he could sleep here at night without clothes and wake to the feel of Sands' skin on his own.

It was good enough to want, and more than enough to want to keep.

Sands' hair was faintly damp, and thick with shampoo scent where it straggled over the pillow against El's nose.

Sands wouldn't always hold himself back, he knew that. There would be times the provocation was too great, or Sands' mood already too far gone before it hit, and then they would move on. But as far as he could, El would be Sands' brakes, the buffer between him and the world outside theirs, the world they brushed against at grocery store checkouts and cantina tables. And Sands would continue to steer El, to snap him back when obsession drove him too hard and deep to think.

It was an odd series of checks and almost forced restraints. Enforced because neither man ever forgot exactly who he was with, the translucent-pale presence of the lines that separated them from violence.

Here they moved in Sands' world, El staying low, watching as Sands plucked over the strings of other players, twisting them tight or letting them loose until they formed the notes and slowly the song he wanted to hear. And Mexico was his, his tune that Sands slid beneath, let himself flow with, holding the rhythm as El dragged threads of destruction through those who needed to hear Mexico's music of justice and vengeance. The consistency through it all the presence of the other and the strange balance they found in it.

El breathed deeper, the shampoo and the soap, and beneath it the sex.

The sex was almost trivial. Good, yes, good enough that its effects far outlasted the simple act, but the sex wasn't what made both of them willing to shape their lives around the other.

There was no tension in the layers beneath his hand, but something low in the lines of Sands' body, in the notes of the air from his barely-parted lips, told that he was awake. "How does it feel?"

No twitch in the skin, no response in flesh and nothing in words.

"Sands?"

Sands didn't move, only his breath flowing stronger, almost a sigh as it ran from him. "El, did no-one ever explain to you the concept that men are supposed to sleep after sex?"

"Men are also supposed to sleep with women, I think I was told," El said lightly. "How does it feel?"

"How does what feel?"

"When I do that to you."

The shift was there this time, in Sands' body, instant through all the planes of muscle stretched bare against El. "Good enough to get me off, obviously." Sands' head was half-turned, the glimpse of a smile at the visible edge of his lips. "I figured you'd get curious eventually."

Sands was wrong in one thing, at least - El had been curious all along, ever since they started this. He looked at the man who shared his bed, studying deeper, unsure he could ever know everything. Sands was endless layers of complexity, seemingly insoluble contradiction; but the patterns in the layers were there, etched into overlapping glass, so that to see, El had only to change the angle of view.

He still wondered that Sands had ever allowed it, had let another man inside him, with all the implications inherent in the act.

The implications were wrong, like so many things he'd been taught. Weak, feminine, broken - Sands was none of those things. He remained inflexibly dangerous and devious, and what he took from El physically in their bed had no influence on who he was. But Sands would have known the myths, that they were there in El's head.

He reached up a hand, stroking fingers along the obsessive smoothness of Sands' jaw and back beneath his hair. "For you to want that, to enjoy it the way you do - it has to be good." His hand slid lower to brush along throat and rest over collarbone. "I want you to fuck me."

Sands raised himself up onto one elbow, face tipped towards him, and El found himself suddenly the focus of an almost detached interest. Not the reaction he'd expected, or wanted. "El, do you have any idea about it at all?"

"I've used fingers. In the shower."

Sands' mouth jumped and curled at one corner. "And you liked it."

"Yes." He wouldn't blush, no matter that Sands couldn't see it. This was just another take on sex, and sex was good, natural, wasn't something to be ashamed of and hidden, he knew that, whatever other people believed, had tried to make him believe.

"Oh, let me tell you, if all you know's a couple of fingers, you've a lot of the alphabet still to go." The smile was familiar self-satisfaction, when the world was a game and Sands had a pre-destined winning line. The same confidence with the information he dangled for someone to bite, with the glide of a trigger on the ones who underestimated, but when Sands chose sex as the play and arranged the angles to suit him with that same intensity, the results were –

El held Sands' face fixed within his eyes, reached for Sands' own weighted style of words. "So you'll have to enlighten me."

The smile crept wider. "Now there's an invitation with potential."

Sands stretched out a hand to run down over El's chest, following the path of hair slow and lazy, and El held himself not to jump, to quiver. Sands' touches were myriad, constant through every day, casual and meaningless; the times when Sands reached deliberate and sexual, instead of reacting only to El's physical approaches, were still rare.

Like everything with Sands, it was about control, and positions of weakness. It was the difference between El wanting sex and Sands acquiescing because it was fun and he had nothing better to do right now, and Sands wanting it, asking something from El that El might deny him.

Tacking with the odd tangents of Sands' mind, El read those times when Sands turned sexual aggressor as a further expression of trust. And this time he'd invited it, enticed it, yes, but the level of his reaction to that first flow of touch was unchanged.

Sands brushed and dipped down along his body, licking light at the sweat over his ribcage, tracing the lines of muscle and bone and hair with his tongue, and El let out breath long and slow and shivering.

Sands gave amazing blow jobs.

Carolina had been talented there too, teasing, playing with a laughing and loving enthusiasm that rendered her more beautiful, more irresistible than ever, giggling around him with flicking tongue and the faintest hint of teeth.

He suspected sex would always be good with a regular lover, with the chance to know each other's bodies and responses, the detail and the intimacy of it burning beyond the first flare of the new, the unexplored. But Sands had learned _fast,_ turning to sex that same incredible attention and focus, the knowledge and prediction and flawless reading of reactions that he used in everything. He'd learned not only El's physical triggers, the sensitivities of different nerves to varied techniques and touches; he'd learned El's moods and the way they changed his wants. Had learned when he sought only the fast fuck to orgasm, when he preferred to stroke and hold it back, when he wanted mutual lazy mouths on flesh, when he needed Sands willing, pliant beneath him and tight around him. Used that knowledge to satisfy, and sometimes to deliberately deny, smiling closed-lipped and twisted.

Sands had his own motives in everything, nothing given entirely free, but El couldn't bring himself to care for the reasons. Not when the results were so good for both of them.

He lay among the deepening rain-patter against roof and window with eyelids drifted shut, living entirely in the twitch of his skin and water-memory contrast to the calloused touch of fingers, the slow-spreading warmth and dampness of breath and tongue traced along his hip. He parted his legs, half-flexed at the knees, and Sands moved instantly and obligingly to settle between. But there was no flash of lowered heat over his unfolding erection, only a passing curl and flick along the base, and El opened his eyes to see nothing of Sands but the dark hair that strayed loose over his thighs.

He lost air in a sweeping rush as Sands' tongue coiled and shaped around his balls, hooking one into the perfect shock of his mouth, sucking down onto him slow and liquid. Eased him out only to take in the other, dizzying clash of damp and swirling air against the exquisite heat of a body, rocking flash of temperature change over his skin. Near-perfect sensation that dissolved into squirming vibration as Sands hummed low and steady around him, a sound and a feeling through the root of him.

It was something Sands had done before, an occasional addition to his sucking El like this, and that in itself not too common since so often sex between them was exactly that. It was nothing like unpleasant, but it wasn't so erotic either, just slightly weird.

If he'd been with Carolina, he would have laughed, told her it felt silly, and they would have giggled together as he tried to describe it, the buzzing over skin pulled tight and the flesh beneath, and he without words to convey it. He wouldn't laugh with Sands, too aware of the trust that was offered, how easily that single strand could be snapped back and coiled away out of his reach. It would leave the others, the braided steel connections of living, of fighting, of protection, but El was greedy enough to want all of it, want every tendril of trust he extended to Sands to be met and matched.

He lifted his head to watch along his body, his fingers tracing a length of barely-damp hair that wandered over his hip. "Do you like that?"

He almost jumped at the cool jab of air as he was released, the brief touch of tongue, the fast-following warmth as Sands spoke over his damp skin. "Having my balls sucked? Hell, yeah, you don't?"

El knew Sands liked it, his reactions drawn in tendon-inked lines the length of his thighs as El's lips slid over him, palpable through every trembling fleck of skin El reached out to touch. "Not that - the humming."

Sands' face tipped up, nose sliding over El's cock with breath and feather-lips and _oh, that –_ "Well, it's different, and that's always good with me."

It made sense with Sands, who could live any existence except boredom, whose darkest purgatory lay in routine and the absence of challenge. It didn't matter whether different was better, only that it wasn't the same.

El only found the things that didn't seal his body tighter into the sex annoyingly distracting. "Different, yes, but not so..." Erotic, stimulating, sexual, and he didn't have a word that Sands wouldn't laugh at.

"Not pushing the buttons for you, huh?" Sands smiled anyway, a neon-tinged flash of teeth that slipped between tease and challenge. "Don't worry, I've got other things I _know_ you'll like." Fingertips light along the muscle of El's calf, parting to trace the edge of a fading scar where once he'd kicked at a knife, and Sands' warmth fell back onto him. Lapping and licking at him, slow and stretching over the skin of his balls, and back to sweep onto the base of his cock in a curve of clinging pleasure, and back to stroke circles heavy and wet towards his ass, and right over him, and _in,_ and El's body locked tight for a hanging instant before every muscle in him _melted, _dripping slack around his bones.

His existence was dragged down into the deepening wrinkles and troughs of the sheets, the slow, sapping pull of the mattress, the sensations that morphed with dizzying speed; a wave of pliable heat conforming to the shivering press of his body, only to reshape rigid and curled and press back at him, a liquid-soft tongue that formed his physical self and his desires around itself, immediate and effortless. Cotton damp beneath his fingers and the arching of his spine, silk-sleek movement that he sought within and stretched for without. Tongue sliding higher to feather warmth wide and soft along the ridge of his cock below his balls, running back tapered and hardened, delicious like a slicked fingernail that could flow back inside and instantly dissolve into pure heat, Sands' lips closing a seal over his skin to suck light with threads running direct down to his deepest nerves, and his own hand was roaming the length of his cock, folding tighter around him, he was going to come, and it was -

Gone. The touching, the lips, the warmth, all of it stopped, only his own fingers left to work him, and that couldn't be enough now, wasn't close to what he wanted.

He was breathing like he'd been shot, and he was strainingly hard, and he wanted... he wanted Sands' tongue back with him, wanted the wet press and throbbing curl of it, the same tongue that had teased so many times between his lips and over his body and he'd never _thought – _

Sands spread light fingertips over the arc of his ribs, rising and falling with each breath, lifted his head towards him with a closed-lipped smile.

El's fingers hooked deeper into the spiral of sheets as he dammed the flow of air pressing through his throat, held it back to form the words. "You didn't tell me about that."

Sands' lips stretched higher at the edges, his head tipping to hint at an angle. "You should never give away all of your secrets, El. Always keep a little something back for when it comes in most useful."

El thought it might have come in useful some time before - though even if he'd known the theory, he wasn't so sure he would have acted on it. To put his mouth, his tongue, _there..._

But he would.

He liked touching Sands. Liked watching him reset, feeling the dissolve from rigid, welded framework to flexibility and cooperation beneath his hands, to a man who would accept the tease, play games that weren't about death. He chased the immediacy of the response - that Sands would change around him and because of him, willing - and he would do anything that would bring it, and quicken it.

The pressure below his thigh disappeared, his leg and his ass dropping back onto the bed as Sands released his grip, wriggling up towards him and reaching out. Sands' thumb rested on his chin, two fingers tracing over the lengthening curve of his lips, and El opened to lick at them, salt from both their bodies laced through the soap, and still the last tang of Sands' earlier come, much more acceptable this way, diluted, half-obscured, and he sucked them in because Sands made him feel so entirely aware, breathless and raw and alive and wanted, and Sands' body was good everywhere. He curled his tongue around the tips, tracing over nails short-clipped and neat that he knew and watched through the days, because Sands' hands told near as much about his thoughts as his expressions, and even while it was only sex, sex could be so much more than 'only'.

Sands' weight shifted away, though his fingers stayed to play at El's lip, pressing his own flesh light onto his teeth. Sands was feeling for the lubricant on the table where it always was, where El had deliberately set it back even when his thoughts and his body had been wholly wrapped up in Sands and need, and Sands flicked open the cap to ooze over his hand, not his cock.

El bit down soft onto the pad of a finger before pushing it away with his tongue. "More games in mind?" he asked, curiosity flashing from the lingering memory of Sands' mouth on him, the shimmering brilliance of it.

Sands slid his fingers together, held glistening into the light, and gave El a slow, easy smile. "Normally I'd stop right there, but since you've never been fucked, that's not going to cut it."

The sheets lay sticky and twisted and comfortable beneath El's shoulders, heavy against his spine, the curve of pillow wrapping soft around his neck. If he'd held any hint of suspicion that Sands wouldn't take care in this, he wouldn't ever have offered it, but the confirmation of the knowledge there settled deep through his muscles as he watched Sands prepare and plan, listened to the forced thrill of his breath, felt the rhythm that rose in his own veins in response.

Sands wasn't love.

El knew love; knew it to be entirely positive and healthy, a force that sought and found the good. Knew it as joy and calm and irreverence, as a selflessness that drove beyond the innate, possessive need. Sands was... some of those things, sometimes, but he would never be love.

But there were other things Sands wasn't.

Sands would fight for him, use his guns, his words, his mind in whatever combination was needed to keep El with him. But when the trap was there, closing with ragged, tearing jaws, El sucked down too fast under the rushing tide of his own floodgate destruction, Sands would walk away.

Sands wouldn't ever choose to die for him.

Enough people had done that.

It wasn't love, but El didn't want that from Sands. It was knowledge and belief, desire and acceptance. Sands wanted him, not in spite of who and what he was, but because of it, every desperate, vicious thing he'd done. And even if he didn't know it was hopeless to try, El wouldn't change Sands. He wouldn't risk breaking that which he admired, wanted, on some grain-dark level maybe now needed, the determination and skill and flashes of brilliance tangled irrevocably with the recklessness, the cruelty.

They were flickering there now, all of them, a combination painted deep over Sands; the lines clustered oil-palette thick around his mouth, lips pulled tight in thought, ideas reshaped with added knowledge, funnelled by his whiplash mind; the tension drawn along the quick curve of his fingers, Sands at the final ambush, the pay-off for patience and plans laid months before.

Sands had been sleepy, sated, reluctant, and El had scratched all of this to the surface with six words. This was the power Sands found in speech; not to force change in the people he invoked, but to drag out of them that which was already there, ready for him to take and use.

El watched, the shifting of thought through Sands clear even as he poured the lubricant over his fingers, drizzling from the bottle liquid and thick. He watched, and he smiled at it small, seeing the creep of Sands' lips with ideas, the satisfaction deep in his muscles with success, and all of it there only because El allowed it.

Sands set the tube aside, laid a hand over El's thigh, dry fingers spreading to stretch over the muscle and rest, unmoving. And still it was almost shock in El as the cold of the gel touched him, as pressure rose and twisted to be allowed in.

He'd used two fingers, standing among the plastic rattle of the water that masked the sounds, enclosed in the swirling rise of steam. Had found he grew hard from that touch alone, the simple movement, the stretch and relax as his knuckles pressed in repeatedly. Had enjoyed the awkward, limited feel of it, standing with his back arched into the splattering spray to get the reach while his hips burned to push up into his own grip.

It was more awkward lying exposed while someone else's narrow finger wriggled its way into him. A finger over which he had no control, and that someone else there, knowing his responses to being penetrated.

His body was relaxed, accepting, because he was with Sands, alone, in a shared bed where there was never threat, and because Sands had just... _licked_ him that way. It was the distractions in his head that spread downwards through tendon and bone, making him hold into stillness beneath the hand on his thigh, tighten briefly around the finger within.

Sands angled his head, query defined sharp in the lines around his lips. "Are you sure you've done this, El?"

"Yes." The word a little short with his irritation, at the question, at himself for provoking it. He knew this response from his first experiments with his own fingers, knew how to close his eyes and breathe and relax himself around it until the only pressure was where he wanted it -

"Well, I guess that's either practice or you're a very fast learner."

El opened his eyes half way, enough to catch the twitch of a smile after the words through his lashes. "Can't it be both?"

"Practiced and fast?" Sands' lower lip slid out, exaggerated pause left for consideration. "Well, the fact you're still alive suggests you might not be unfamiliar with the combination, so I could possibly be convinced. After some suitable research, of course." The last sentence flowed with the circling of the finger, a smooth, brushing flick within, and _that _was what he'd found and explored in himself, what he'd enjoyed.

He thought he might like Sands' take on research.

With the obvious pleasure, with the catch and the rise of it, it was natural to be relaxed as Sands pressed more, took more, nothing stilted in the growing stretch of it.

He still missed the heat of Sands' mouth.

He liked the fingers, as he'd known he would, but they weren't quick and perfect and so very malleable, a definitive shape inside him now, moulded only at the joints. He was still hard, but no longer mindlessly driven the way he'd been when Sands had used his tongue. It would be some time before he was again ready to come.

And then there were no more fingers, everything drawing back, and El quivered with the quick-spinning taps of apprehension, because Sands would fuck him now.

Sands rolled away from him to flop onto his back among the sheets, a shock deep through the mattress that was matched by the jump in El's head. "Aren't you going to –"

"Fuck you?" Sands' head tipped towards him, half his smile lost in the rise of the pillow. "Oh, yes. But not that way. You're on top, you make the choices."

El considered that through long seconds, but couldn't shape it into sense. "How do I choose when I don't know what I want?"

"If it's right, it doesn't hurt - if it does, you stop. That's the only rule."

"I thought –"

"You thought I'd want to shove you down into the sheets, fuck you hard like you did me?" Sands spoke with one eyebrow raised and a curl at the corner of his mouth. "If you don't like this, you won't do it again. I'm not about to risk losing the opportunity because you decided to play macho and didn't say to put the brakes on."

_losing the opportunity_

El wondered then just how long Sands had been waiting for him to offer it.

All the months he'd been sleeping with Sands, and he hadn't asked - hadn't even much paused to wonder if Sands might prefer something else. Sands enjoyed what they did, yes, he knew that, but it had always been –

He'd been unfair. He should have asked.

He couldn't have asked, not when he wasn't willing to _do_. And he couldn't have done it, not when Sands clung out of desperation, when he restrained himself around El because he saw no other choice. A restraint that would have disappeared any moment a more tempting alternative was offered.

Not until he could trust.

"Christ, El, don't start thinking too hard - it's kind of on the late side for it, wouldn't you say?" Sands had wriggled up onto an elbow, giving El the full benefit of the curve stretched along his lips. "Yeah, I'm all in favour of a little variety, but if I didn't like being fucked, you wouldn't ever have gotten near me."

El knew that, knew he couldn't even once do to Sands what the man didn't want without the use of real force - Sands would play no kind of suffering martyr. Though he might choose to trade off present inconveniences against some longer term game.

Whatever the original truth of it, the desires had flared fast and real in both of them.

He flipped himself onto his knees, spread wide over Sands, reaching out for his cock, the wet-glistening glow of it in his hand lost in the shadow of his own body as he lowered himself. Sands' erection slick in his fingers as he adjusted his grip and the angle, until his body parted steadily around the push of it, widening fast to the sudden ease back behind the head.

He paused with the burn of muscle heavy through his thighs, considering sensation, the physical presence thick within him. A surprising tightness, Sands never feeling this big between El's curled fingers or between his lips, but nothing more.

This was... okay.

He slid himself downwards, slow, careful, feeling the stretch of it reach and spread within him. Reaching until his thighs met Sands' skin, and he relaxed all through, letting Sands' body take some of his weight from his limbs.

Sands had said there might be hurt, but there wasn't. There was something of pressure, what could be the beginnings of ache, but not pain. El knew pain, in all its slicing, clawed guises, and this was less than even its moon-scattered shadow.

He drew himself higher again, the slide of it distinct and entirely smooth inside, settling back onto Sands a little faster, easier with the knowledge he could take this. He let himself find something of a rhythm; slow, steady, movement curving soft at the change of each stroke, working Sands now the way he himself liked to give it at the beginning of sex. The rocking and the glide became more natural with repetition, his body settling into the novel sensations, his mind no longer so absorbed and adjusting, his attention shifting instinctively outwards to his partner –

Sands was locked beneath him, tremors rippling along his muscles irregular and broken, the line of his jaw tight with restraint. His fingers stretched wide and flat across El's skin, touching without feeling, no movement to give pleasure, no spontaneous curl in desire.

Sex this way was... odd, felt a little strange, but there was nothing unpleasant in it. He'd been unfair before - he could do no less now than to offer Sands what Sands had given to him.

He slipped himself up off Sands, and Sands' fingers twitched on his thighs and lines deepened along his forehead, his attention all back instantly on El. "Problem?"

"Yes." El slid his leg over Sands' and dropped back onto the bed to lie flat. "I was right before. I would prefer a different way."

Sands tipped his head on the pillow in the briefest consideration before his lips eased from taut thinness. Agreement, good. "Turn over. It's easier."

El wasn't so sure that was right. If he was going to let a man... fuck him, he wanted to see the man.

But Sands knew El in intricate, astonishing detail, knew and understood him without ever seeing him, and El was just as capable. He knew Sands' hands, the length of his fingers, the rough patterns raised on the skin at their tips. He knew the sounds he made and their meanings, knew his movements, both sharply controlled and honestly casual.

He'd had sex with Sands in every position he knew of (though it occurred to him now that there might be more, and Sands was only waiting for him to ask) and Sands would know the differences well enough.

He flipped himself onto his stomach, twisting closer to Sands in a single smooth movement.

Sands rolled up onto his elbow and poked him in the ear with the corner of a pillow. "Push this under your hips."

It was something Sands did sometimes, when it was slower, planned, instead of here-and-now fucking. "Why?"

Sands curled his lips in slightly crooked amusement. "You'll work it out."

El would get no more revealing an answer, and he pushed up with his elbow, wriggling the pillow into place beneath him. He was instantly more comfortable, less of the arching stress along his spine, his erection folded into enclosing softness instead of pressed into the solidity of the mattress, but somehow he didn't think that was what Sands had meant.

The bed dipped and trembled with Sands' weight, shifting lower between his knees, and this was better, Sands loose and mobile around him, the brush of fingers casual over El's skin. Sex between them was pleasure and ease, or the biting, tense rush of lust and grasping hands, never awkwardness or restraint.

Sands had a hand heavy on his ass, ran the other smooth and fast down over his ribs, his flank. "Don't you forget, El, you asked for this." Words quiet with a warning that was distinctly Sands, and with Sands, warning was also threat.

No change through El's body, no pause, because he did want this, and he had asked. It wasn't sex he wanted, not a man, or a woman, or someone to be with. He wanted Sands, and wanting Sands was wanting the violence and the threat, and hearing it now only fitted with who he was, who they both were.

"I asked," he said simply. "So do it."

Sands didn't bother to say more, just his hands on him, adjusting his legs, spreading him, pushing in, and it was... easy. The movement stopped, Sands' hips close against his, and it wasn't so deep as when he'd lowered himself onto Sands. El was left unsure if that was inevitable with the position, or only Sands being cautious, if it might change. When he pressed himself up into Sands, he was too bound into the wanting of it to think and compare, to consider the subtleties.

He wondered when Sands had last done this, had last been inside someone. El had taken him in his mouth, but that wasn't the same; too much holding back, unable to simply free the hips and _push_.

He wondered if Sands had done this during the months he'd been gone. Not like this, in a bed, naked and unarmed, no, but he could have found someone; some man or more likely a woman pressed up against a wall behind a cheap bar, shadowed in the sickly one am half-light. Her skirt gathered up in sagging folds around her hips, head back and hair splayed midnight black in heat-frizzed curls along crumbling stucco as Sands took her, dying neon buzzing overhead and its glow flickering red across half his face.

The image poured into his mind didn't disturb him - Sands was cautious enough to use protection in such a situation, and oddly, perhaps, given his own nature, El felt no driving flare of anger, of possession.

Those people were unimportant. Sands would have smoked a cigarette around the corner and listened to that same woman scream beneath the thuds as she was beaten, and not taken out a gun to protect her.

The pictures, the details flashing through El's head as Sands moved slow now within him, they only made him burn, made his cock shiver and tighten against his stomach - Sands' lips sliding to whisper blunt proposition into the curve of an ear, his gloved hands gripping black on a dull-golden length of thigh; air circling chill between bodies, no contact close enough to reveal the guns as Sands pushed in, into someone who thought they knew who they were with, just a little, and knowing nothing, every word, every move lies and deceit. Neon-coated flash of teeth as Sands hissed out air, hair swinging, dipping forwards with the quick jerk of his hips to his partner's gasp.

And with the thoughts, El wanted it. Wanted it that way, the deliberate and leashed aggression that was entirely Sands; wanted it through the caged part of his soul that always reached for it, that resonated and sang with it, and with this man.

And he knew he'd get it; perhaps inevitable now after that warning from Sands, certain if he let himself ask for it.

When he fought, it was capitulation of a kind, abandoning the struggle of his self and letting the violence have control, letting it take him, flow into him and use him. And now he surrendered his body to the violence in an entirely different way, to this man who delighted in it, personified it; different, yes, but the same feeling, the same gaping moment of elation with the decision to fall, to stop thought of the shore and thunder with the floodwaters among the rocks, movement a pure, unquestioned response to instinct and desire.

He drew his knees up beneath him, lifting, gaining leverage, because his body wanted this, the sensation within, slick and rhythmic, wanted to move and encourage more; because his mind wanted it, wanted Sands, the faint brush of the ends of his hair along his spine, wanted Sands with him, and this was Sands with him in a way he would be with no-one else. And the movement inside brought heat and spinning lust, rising rhythmic with each slide of Sands into him, his hips arching back into it to stretch and speed the burn, more of it needed to let him fully _feel_.

He'd done this to himself, with fingers, but it hadn't _been_ this. Touching himself never could be, not the same thing as contact from someone distinct, real and warm and moving, because if sex alone was an equal, no-one would ever risk reaching out for another.

His body had reached for Sands from the first time he'd let himself touch and know, and he reached again now in this new way that drove him just as hard. He wanted to stroke himself, snatch the desire and wring everything from it, and he wanted to hold back, to keep this, draw it out, and there was no decision because Sands' fingers were there for him, curving damp over the pillow and around, his cock pressing into them eager and demanding.

This was what Sands took from him, the reaction he gave him, and he gave it now in return. Gave the tremors and the urgency in his body under Sands' trailing touches, gave the catch and shudder of his breath and the flow of his air that was almost a moan, because he wanted no restraint or pretence from Sands, and he could hold none himself.

Could hold nothing as the flares sparking within him drew together and ignited, orgasm wrenching through muscle and lungs to leave him heaving like a bolted mule, kneeling low with arms spread flat before him and forehead pressed down to the ruffles of the sheets, stretched like worship in a sin he no longer believed.

Sands was heavy on him, heat and the sharp, cyclical drive of ribs, trailing hair and the light flick of a tongue over his spine. El hadn't felt him come, the sensations rippling through his own body too distracting, too involving - but only orgasm did this to Sands, stole enough of the tension from his mind that his body could follow into languor, into effortless sprawl.

There were moments spread long before Sands wriggled off him, eased carefully out of him, but El wasn't counting.

The resulting wet, dribbling feel of liquid from inside over his skin was less pleasant, El's lips pulling thinner as he reached for the tissues to clean himself and flopped back alongside Sands. Turned his head to watch, Sands' face still beyond the movement of air past his lips.

He traced fingers along the curve at Sands' brow and back to his hairline, following the line pale across his face where the sunglasses lay and the sun never touched. Near-white skin that ceded to blanching of another kind, the ravaging of scars, glistening reminder of the cooled, distorted wax run from a candle lit for vigil.

They would fade, slow, the raised skin becoming less pronounced, shrinking back into the surface of that surrounding. In perhaps a decade, they wouldn't stare so, dissolving into the colour of his skin and the lines that would naturally deepen around the hollows. If Sands could live long enough for it to happen.

"You didn't tell me that either," El said.

Sands arched his eyebrow, skin stretching fine and lines redrawn beneath El's fingers. "I didn't have to. You'd already figured it out."

El drew his arm back in, resting his head on his shoulder, then decided there were better supports to avoid the stiffness in his neck. He slid his free hand over the sheets, and encountered the cooled remains of his own come. "The pillow's a mess," he said, the distaste in his words loosed deliberate.

Sands whipped out a hand to snatch away the pillow that had lain by El's head and slide it beneath his own. "That's why it's your pillow," he said, quick matching curve of eyebrows and lips.

El had little energy and no desire to argue it by pointing out that the pillow had been Sands' idea. He turned it over, sticky side down, moving the shotgun away to the edge. At least this way, he wasn't sleeping on the damp.

Maybe that was what Sands had in mind about using the pillow, but more likely it was the ease of getting a hand to his erection, reaching into softness instead of having to wriggle and push past the mattress.

He wanted a cigarette, but he didn't want to move.

Sands had stilled again, draped loose and half-covered by the folds of sheet that shaped to his breaths.

El was almost surprised that Sands had made no comment on his reactions; he'd been readied for the risk of words, the casual, angled barbs on just how much the great Mariachi had enjoyed sex that way.

But he thought maybe Sands wouldn't say that any more than El would laugh.

Sands didn't need him now, but all the months he had been deliberately tying El to him, time and exposure had bound Sands just as securely to El, the connections weaving back and forth between too many times, coiling and knotting, inevitable. Sands had tuned himself to El like a radio, so that El broadcast to him everything about the world he couldn't know for himself, and El thought maybe that should have disturbed him, but it had been going on long before he saw the true extent of it, and when he did, it came as something closer to relief.

The trust Sands had given to El, he had been driven to by specific circumstances, when his only alternative to accepting El around him had been to die. He wouldn't ever give it to another. Sands might leave again - almost certainly would if he had plans that El would prefer not to know about - but he would come back, each time. El was his only release valve, the only place he could go to shed some of the pressure from himself.

And El would be as unlikely to ever find another who knew.

He had had friends in the village, people who would listen with sympathy, but there were lines in what he would ask them to accept, in what they could truly comprehend. This life, any life, was barren, desolate without someone who understood, and Sands _knew_. Knew how it really was to live his life, the exhilaration he sought and found in it even as it ripped him down.

Sands was... not ideal. He could be a difficult companion, was too much like those El stood against. It was only chance that had turned them allies instead of enemies.

El's life had rarely been ideal, and he'd learned to take what he could.

Sands reached across to the cigarettes on the table and stuck two between his lips to light, passing one on to El. The familiar filter slipped into place between his fingers, sharp tobacco scent dragging at his instincts, simple habitual gesture bringing it to him. Sands trailed smoke from the corner of his mouth, lips that weren't wrapped around the cigarette curling upwards with it. "Different, isn't it?"

El didn't even have to consider it. "Yes."

It was still sex, and he still came, and he'd been expecting it to be the same, but it wasn't. A level to the sensations that was shattered, and he didn't know if he felt that intensity because that was how it always was or simply because it was new.

Sands blew smoke heavy across the room, angled his head half El's way, neon shimmering yellow over the white edge of scar. "So I take it you won't have any objections to switching off a little in future?"

For a moment he thought of his parents, what they would think of him now. His mother's wide-mouthed shock, the power of words dragged from her in her horror at his life of irrevocable sin. His father's cursed disgust, who had once been so proud, so encouraging.

Those would be their reactions before they knew that the man he touched, whose lips he tasted, whose body he shared, was a psychopath, guiltless and entirely selfish. That such a man fitted El's life so easily now, he no longer even saw it as a concern, only something to be accepted and worked around unthinking, as there were flaws and differences to be compensated for in any lover.

Neither of his parents would have been proud of the man he'd been for a long time now.

"No." The cigarette hung from his fingers, trailing ash, half-smoked, and he crushed it into the heavy glass beside him. "No objections."

He bent his head and he kissed Sands, because he could.

Because Sands didn't just let him, Sands kissed back.


End file.
